Kent Nerburn - The Artists Journey: On Making Art and Being an Artist

Also by Kent Nerburn

Calm Surrender

Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce

Letters to My Son

Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace

Simple Truths

Small Graces

The Wolf at Twilight

Neither Wolf Nor Dog

Native Echoes

The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo

Ordinary Sacred

Voices in the Stones

The trade paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2018
as Dancing with the Gods by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

Copyright Kent Nerburn, 2018

The right of Kent Nerburn to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

For permission credits please see

While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN: 978 1 78689 117 4
eISBN 978 1 83885 148 4

For Tom Kraabel, who believed in me, and
Wayne Rood, who taught me that art must care

Contents

Art is a spiritual pursuit
It is wrestling with the angels
It is dancing with the gods

Introduction:

Dreams and Fears

Choosing the artists life

Inside you theres an artist you dont know about.
Rumi

RECENTLY I RECEIVED a note from a young woman named Jennifer who was questioning her decision to pursue a life in the arts. She had a dream, she felt a calling, but she was feeling alone and misunderstood.

Is it worth it? she asked. Is it possible? What advice can you give me?

Her letter touched me. It mirrored the doubts and yearnings of my own youth. Though I couldnt tell her what to do, I wanted to respond.

This is what I wrote to her:

Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for your kind letter. You honour me by thinking that I might have some advice to offer on your questions about devoting your life to the arts. It takes great courage to reach out to a person you dont know because something in their work touches a chord in you and resonates with that private, unspoken place of your dreams. I know, because I did the same when I was younger. In my case, it was to Norman Mailer.

Why I chose Norman Mailer, I dont know. I certainly didnt find his emotional sensibilities attuned to mine. His work, though powerful, was not consonant with my own literary spirit. I think it was because there was a muscularity in his intellectual manner that I felt was lacking in my own life. I had just begun a graduate programme at Stanford University, and the combination of the intellectual demands of the academic life and the shock of a new living and learning environment graduate school, at least at that time, was a far different animal than undergraduate school made me feel ever further from the living streets and ordinary people where I felt most vibrant and alive. Mr Mailers work probably gave me hope that there was a way to be intelligent without being an intellectual, and that a life on the streets did not negate a life of the mind.

Whatever it was, I wrote him, and though I do not have a copy of the letter, I can guess what I said. It was likely very much like your letter confessional, almost pleading, a lifeline thrown to a person whose life and accomplishments seemed to resonate with what I wanted for myself and what so few others seemed to understand. I suppose I wanted a helping hand, or maybe an occupational road map, or maybe just the simple acknowledgement that my plight and dreams were real and worthy.

I do remember that I asked if I could come to New York and work with him a request that makes me blush even now when I think of it. But Mr Mailer, gruff though he might have seemed in his public persona, wrote back with gentle compassion.

I have the note still today, written on a manual typewriter and signed with a fountain pen. Ill share it with you in its entirety because it speaks to the generosity of the man:

I dont remember my immediate reaction. But I held on to that note like a drowning man holds on to a piece of passing wreckage. I was acknowledged; I was real; I was worthy of a response from a man whose life was inconceivably greater and more resolved than mine. Perhaps I was not going to drown.

I hope that by writing to you I can give you some of the same solace, because you are real, you are worthy, your dreams are worth pursuing. And you are not going to drown.

I know, because I have walked the same time-honoured path. All artists have. We have shared your doubts. We have wrestled the same demons and held the same dreams. And all of us would tell you the same thing: though it is not an easy journey, it is a journey worth taking.

You will live in a world of uncertainty, never knowing if your creations are good enough, always fearing financial cataclysm, unsure if your dreams are more than self-delusion, and vulnerable to feelings of persecution and self-doubt. You will see others with less talent accomplishing more and feel the sting of unwarranted criticism. You will feel angry, lonely, unappreciated, and misunderstood.

But you will also live in a world of joy, with its magical moments when the act of creation lifts you and propels you with a power that seems to come from beyond yourself. You will remain constantly vibrant and young at heart because your urge to create will keep your spirit alive and interested in the world around you long after others in other professions have become weary and soul-deadened in the monotonous sameness of their everyday lives. And you will own your own time, and know the miraculous experience of having intimate conversations with people long dead and far away through your personal dialogue with their art. You will know what it is to work with love.

Few people on the outside will understand the precarious nature of this life. They will see only the accolades and accomplishments, the apparent freedom and the finished products of your efforts.

They will not understand that the person who creates something from the intimacy of their own imagination and places it before others as a gift of the creative spirit stands on the precipice of failure and rejection or, worse yet, mediocrity at every moment. That by creating a work of art a performance, a painting, a piece of writing or anything else you have, metaphorically speaking, brought a child into the world, and the rejection of a child of your creation hurts you with the pain of a parent watching their child be ignored, demeaned, and seen as unworthy.